More Like This

Preview

Chapter 7 discusses the adaptation of state parties’ electoral strategies to the new institutional setting of devolution. The chapter shows that state parties’ pro-periphery moves were more credible in a decentralized state where state parties competed in regional elections. As a result, state parties’ pro-periphery strategies became more effective and more widely used. This did not always result in lower electoral returns for peripheral parties. Moreover, new peripheral parties emerged and grew dramatically in short periods of time in Belgium and Italy. These parties were all characterized...

Chapter 7 discusses the adaptation of state parties’ electoral strategies to the new institutional setting of devolution. The chapter shows that state parties’ pro-periphery moves were more credible in a decentralized state where state parties competed in regional elections. As a result, state parties’ pro-periphery strategies became more effective and more widely used. This did not always result in lower electoral returns for peripheral parties. Moreover, new peripheral parties emerged and grew dramatically in short periods of time in Belgium and Italy. These parties were all characterized by radical pro-periphery agendas of a kind impossible for state parties to match. Only in Belgium could ex-state parties, those that had become regional parties, attempt to match these radical agendas. The persistence of the peripheral party threat, combined with the institutional incentives that state parties found to compete along territorial issues, produced new rounds of devolution reforms.